


life goes on

by allidon



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Birthdays, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 12:57:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13858230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allidon/pseuds/allidon
Summary: All the times Jenna and Liam spend his birthday alone, and the first time they don't.





	life goes on

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tabbytabbytabby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabbytabbytabby/gifts).



> Because Tabby said she wanted more Jenna.

**0.**

Every inch of her body aches, and she hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours, and the cramping in her belly is almost unbearable.

She doesn’t care.

He barely weighs eight pounds, but it feels like the whole world rests in the crook of her arm, pressed against the bare skin of her breast. He’s wearing a soft white babygro and an ugly blue knitted hat, and his tiny hands are curled into fists.

She can’t stop looking at him.

He doesn’t have a name yet, but it doesn’t matter. She already knows him more intimately than anyone she’s ever met.

“Hi,” she whispers, barely louder than a breath leaving her body. “Hi baby. I’m your Mommy.” He turns in the direction of the sound, eyes unfocused. His little red face wrinkles, and he makes a loud squawking noise.

“I know,” she says, in that same soft and gentle voice that she’s never heard herself use before today. “I know baby,” and she strokes her pinky finger against the downy skin of his cheek as he makes rooting motions with his mouth. “You’re so beautiful,” she murmurs, and he wriggles against her chest, as if this isn’t close enough for him, as if he wants to burrow down further.

She rests a hand on his back, rubbing her thumb back and forth, and she marvels at the tiny flutter of his heartbeat, the rapid rise and fall of his chest, the fragile bones still forming under his skin. He’s so small, so helpless.

“I’m never going to let anything happen to you,” she promises. “I love you. I love you so much.”

He squawks again, and she laughs, and then moves him a little so she can feed him. “Okay,” she says, as she positions him the way nurse had shown her before. “Okay, Liam.”

**1.**

She wakes on Liam’s first birthday to an empty bed and her son calling from his nursery.

“Mah! Mah! Mah!”

He’s standing up in his cot, bouncing up and down from his knees, and when he sees her in the doorway his face splits into a wide grin, showing off his brand-new bottom teeth. “Mah!”

“Hi baby,” she croons, lifting him into her arms and swiping away the drool that’s collecting on his face with a muslin cloth. “Happy birthday!”

They eat breakfast—or, she eats breakfast and feeds porridge to Liam’s chin—and it isn’t until she’s loading the dishwasher that she sees her husband’s coffee mug already stacked there and it sets off an unexpected wave of anger, washing over her in icy clarity.

One day. Is that too much to ask?

“Mah!” Liam says, and she looks over at him in his highchair. He’s banging his juice cup on the tray, and somehow he’s gotten porridge in his hair, and he’s watching her with big blue eyes.

“Oh dear,” she says with a laugh. “I think we need a bath before presents.”

So she bathes him, and dresses him in her favourite outfit, and she combs his hair so that it dries flat. They open his presents, and he scrunches the paper and giggles and giggles and giggles, and she spends half the morning trying to put his new wooden tricycle together. Her parents arrive mid-afternoon, and they eat little sandwiches and cocktail sausages and quiche, and then she shows Liam how to blow out the one candle on his cake and he claps his hands excitedly.

And then she bathes him again, and puts his pyjamas on, and she cuddles him close as he drinks his milk, his eyes drowsy. She strokes his soft blond hair, and tries to picture how tiny he’d been just a year ago. “You’re so beautiful,” she tells him, and he smiles sleepily at her around the bottle teat. “I love you, Liam.”

 

**2.**

He leaves her two days before Liam’s second birthday. He tries to buy her off in platitudes, _people change_ and _it’s not you, I swear_ and _I’m still his father, dammit_ , but deep down she’s known about his affair for weeks.

Not that the knowledge has brought her any comfort. She hasn’t slept in three days, and hasn’t eaten properly for longer. She wonders if soon she might start to fade away.

Liam pokes her in the leg, and she blinks at him. Guilt starts as bile in her stomach and eats at her oesophagus. This isn’t his fault. It’s supposed to be his special day.

“Cake?” he asks, the same way he has every day since his friend Mason’s birthday party three weeks earlier.

“Yes,” she tells him. “Yes, we can have cake today.”

She eats three pieces of cake, and Liam falls asleep in her bed, and she decides that from now on they’re going to be ok.

 

**3.**

They spend the day before his third birthday driving to the beach. She’s hired a little cabin for a few days, determined that this birthday will make up for the last one. She knows that it’s silly, that to him it’s already forgotten and that one day is nothing in the span of a year in which they’ve learned how to be a family of two, but she still looks back on that day with more guilt than any other.

He sleeps most of the way there, which means he wakes her far too early on the morning of his birthday, but she can’t bring herself to mind. Instead, she makes herself coffee, and pours him some juice, and they sit on the little wooden deck and watch the sun come up.

“Wow,” Liam says, when she points out the colours in the sky. _Wow_ is currently his favourite word, and so most things are _wow_ , but she allows herself to imagine a little extra awe in his use of it this morning.

They go out onto the beach once the tide is out, and he says _wow_ when he feels the sand slide through his fingers, and _wow_ when the shallow waves run over his bare toes, and _wow_ when she digs a hole and buries his legs in it.

“Wow,” Liam says, when she buys them ice creams and he pokes his tongue into it, his forehead scrunching at the strange cold sensation.

“Yes,” she agrees softly, suddenly struck by how much he’s grown, and learned, and developed in three short years. “Wow.”

They walk back up the beach as the sun goes down, and halfway there he lifts his arms insistently. She scoops him into her arms obligingly, his legs gripping tight around her waist and his face buried into her shoulder.

“Lub you, Mama,” he mumbles against her neck.

“I love you too, Liam,” she whispers back, and tightens her grip, just a little.

 

**4.**

Liam wakes up on his fourth birthday with chicken pox. At seven-thirty, there are three spots on his chest, and by lunchtime he’s covered in them.

“We can have a party just you and me,” she tells him, her heart breaking at the disappointment on his face when she tells him that they need to call his friends and cancel his party. They’ve been planning it for weeks, and he had been so excited to finally get his turn at handing invitations around. “And we can do something nice with your friends once you’re better.”

“Okay,” he says, his voice cracking a little.

Her mom arrives at eleven-thirty with a bag of supplies: calamine lotion and two more bottles of children’s paracetamol and a bottle of red wine.

“The wine is for you,” she says with a wink, and then she’s gone back to work and it’s just Jenna and Liam, curled up together on the sofa. Liam is hot and uncomfortable, and he sleeps in fitful bursts, and then presses closer to her as if he needs to be as close as possible.

He makes a half-hearted attempt at blowing out birthday candles, and picks his piece of cake apart without really eating much, and when it’s bedtime he blinks tiredly at her and asks to sleep in her bed.

“Of course,” she says, and she tucks him in, and brushes his sticky hair off his face, and she watches him sleep until she can barely keep her own eyes open.

“Love you,” she whispers softly to him, and she falls asleep with his warm body tucked in to her side.

**5.**

 “Mommy,” he asks her on his fifth birthday. “Why don’t I have a daddy?”

The question hits like a punch to the gut. It’s not that she isn’t expecting it, or that she hasn’t prepared for it, because it’s been at the back of her mind for years, it’s just that. Well. She hadn’t expected it to feel quite so blunt.

“Well,” she says, careful to keep her voice calm, to leave her own emotions out of this. “You do have a daddy. Everyone has a daddy, because that’s how you get a baby. But sometimes, a mommy or a daddy isn’t very good at it. And that means that sometimes we don’t get to see them.”

Liam frowns. “Is my daddy not a good daddy?”

“He tried to be,” she says. “I think he wanted to be. But in the end, no he wasn’t. And that’s his fault, baby. Not yours.”

“Okay,” Liam says, his face creased up in that way it does when he’s thinking. “Do you think it matters that I don’t have a daddy?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “What do you think?”

He creases his face again. “Not really,” he says. “You do all the daddy things and all the mommy things.”

They don’t talk about it anymore that day. They go to the zoo, and Liam chatters excitedly about the monkeys, and he tries to read all the signs, and they buy ice cream and he doesn’t say _wow_ but he does grin at her like she’s his whole world, and get ice cream all over his face, and by the time they get home he’s hot and sticky and he needs a bath. He sleeps in her bed, and he looks so old when he’s awake but so young when he’s asleep, and she strokes his face and tucks his hair behind his ear, and she watches him sleep because five years ago he was brand new, and so much has changed since then.

Two weeks later, her car breaks down. She’s stranded on the side of the road, and the man that pulls in to help her is a doctor, and he has a lovely smile, and he talks her into going for coffee, _just a coffee, scout’s honour_ , and he makes her laugh in a different way to the way that Liam does, and when he asks her to go to dinner she can’t help but say yes.

 

**+1.**

David buys Liam a bike for his sixth birthday. It’s blue and silver, bigger than the one he has already in the garage.

“I hope it’s ok?” David had asked her, the week before when he’d showed it to her. “I just noticed his other one’s getting a little small.”

“No training wheels?” she’d asked instead of answering right away, because there was a sort of simmering joy in her stomach and she didn’t quite know why.

“No,” he’d said, face creased in concern. “Is that— I mean, I thought that I could teach him how to ride it?”

“It’s wonderful,” she’d told him, her arms around his neck and her mouth against his ear. “He’s going to love it.”

On the day of Liam’s birthday, David brings the bike over in the middle of the morning, and Liam’s face lights up. “Can I ride it now, Mom?”

She smiles at David over the top of Liam’s head. “Yes,” she tells Liam. “David can help you, if you’d like?”

Liam grabs David’s hand, and pulls him out of the door, and they all spend three hours at the park until Liam pedals a wobbly circle around the grass without falling off once.

“I did it!” he shouts over to them, and Jenna whoops, and David cheers, and Jenna slides her arms around David’s waist and presses her face against his chest.

“You ok?” he asks her, that little hint of concern showing around his eyes again.

“I am,” she says. “I’m just—really happy.”

“Good,” he says, watching as Liam makes his way back to them. “Me too.”

“Can David come for dinner with us?” Liam asks when he reaches them, red-faced and breathless. Jenna feels the rumble of David’s laugh against her ear.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” she says to Liam, and Liam grins, a gap in his bottom row of teeth where he’d finally lost his first one.

“Can you?” he says, looking past her and up at David’s face.

“I would like that a lot,” David says, and his voice has a serious edge to it, as if he understands just how important Liam’s question is.

“Good,” Liam says. “Because there’s gonna be ice cream and candles and cake.”

“In that case,” David says. “I think I am _definitely_ coming for dinner.”

He comes for dinner, and they eat ice cream, and Liam blows out candles, and he falls asleep pressed in between them on the sofa halfway through the movie, and Jenna strokes his hair, and studies the way his eyelashes rest against his cheek and the steady rise and fall of his chest, and then she looks at David. He’s looking at her, and he’s smiling his lovely smile, and Liam’s head is lolling against his chest a little.

That joy simmers in her stomach again, and she wriggles a little so that she can get closer to him. His arm is a comforting weight around her shoulder.

“I love you,” he says, and in six years so much has changed, but the certainty in his voice makes his words feel permanent.

“I love you too,” she says, soft and hesitant, because those words have been Liam’s for so long and it’s new and scary to give them to someone else.

She rests her head on his shoulder, and he strokes her hair, and he kisses the top of her head, and she smiles. His body is warm and solid beside her, and Liam snuffles in his sleep between them, and it feels like everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be.


End file.
